Page 890 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013
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Football, soccer, is played for nearly 31,000 hours a year; Rugby League for 6,000 hours; softball for over 4,000 hours; cricket for over 5,200 hours; and Australian Rules for over 5,200 hours. At last count our ovals had over 81,000 hours of booked sports usage a year. But that is where the good news ends. Headlines in local papers over the past months have included “Players sick of taking trips: petition calls for action on Kambah oval upgrades”, “Club calls fault over high rates for poor service”, and “Community sport facilities neglected under ACT Labor government”.
In the lead-up to the 2012 election, the Canberra Liberals were only too aware of how much pressure local sport clubs were under. We spoke of football clubs who had to turn away junior players because there was not an oval available to play on. We spoke with club officials who had to rely on the Saturday canteen and raffles to keep the clubs afloat. We spoke to sports fans who raised concerns about putrid toilet blocks, makeshift canteen facilities, and players who had inadequate changing facilities. And of course there is no sports oval anywhere in Canberra that can accommodate the cars that attend regular Saturday and Sunday morning sporting competitions. We can see the cars parked on areas where they should not be parking, on verges. There are a lot of issues in this whole area of junior sport that need to be looked at.
We spoke with club officials in several sports. Above all, there was one common theme—the cost of venue hire. Ground fees are a major impost on clubs. We know they are because we went to the clubs and talked to them. It is called consultation, Mr Barr. In every sport, ground fees came up time and time again as an issue of concern.
I realise that this is a bit of a catch-22 for government. On the one hand, they have to maintain facilities and they also have to recoup costs. But here Labor are duplicitous. They claim to support junior sport, but they lift fees and do not improve facilities. And they dismiss the whole thing as unimportant.
In 2011, when we first flagged that in government we would make junior sport more affordable, we did it with the evidence that training and match fees had increased by 135 per cent, making it difficult for large families to afford organised activities. So as early as October 2011, we announced that in government we would cut ground training and match fees by 50 per cent for all junior clubs.
We thought that for a government that purports to support junior sport, here was an opportunity to come out and match the Liberal offer or better it. Instead, in debating the issue in the Assembly, Minister Barr was dismissive, suggesting that junior sports were already heavily subsidised because they wanted “to generate greater levels of participation”. Increasing the fees by such a large amount is meant to do what, minister? Generate lower levels of participation?
During the election campaign, the only promises this government gave followed the tried and tested Labor Party formula: offer them bigger and better, and give them a completion date after the next election—a new grandstand for Gungahlin; a new Olympic size swimming pool for Weston and an enclosed oval; a $5.1 million soccer facility at Melrose high; and a study into indoor facilities for the north side. There
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